Understanding Stress, Willpower & Discipline - Dr Andrew Huberman (4K)

What were you just teaching me about mouth breathing and how it changes the shape of the face?

Yeah. So I arrived carrying a copy of the book, Jaws: A Hidden Epidemic. This is not Jaws the shark. Uh, this book was written by my colleagues at Stanford, Sandra Khan and Paul Ehrlich. And it has an introduction by Jared Diamond, who won a Pulitzer for Guns, Germs, and Steel, and a forward by the great Robert Sapolsky, also a colleague of mine at Stanford. So four heavy hitters on this book, just to credential it first. Um, this book centers around a couple of core concepts, but the first being that people, and in particular children, who overuse mouth breathing as opposed to nasal breathing have changes in the structure of the face that, well, to be quite direct, makes them far more unattractive than if they were to mouth breathe. It also discusses the chewing of foods as essential to mouth and face development. Sandra Khan is an expert in craniofacial function and structure, um, and the fact that if your parents and you did things right, you should be able to place your en- your entire tongue on the roof of your mouth with your mouth closed. Now, I can't do that. Okay? So when you, with teeth closed-

Mm-hmm.

... tongue on the roof of your mouth, I can, but I still feel the back of my teeth a bit. Um, so I, yeah.

Okay, yeah.

Um, but the, so that's the second point, that we want to chew har- ch- chewing foods is essential to tooth and mouth and face development. Um, these days, many children slurp their food. Uh, many adults slurp their foods. Um, many adults are eating like babies, and of course, babies before they develop their mature teeth, and even when they h- before they get all of their teeth in need to obviously breast milk and, um, you know, pudding like foods. Okay. But so that's the second point. So nasal breathing, good, mouth breathing, bad for craniofacial development. Chewing hard foods, chewing a lot on both sides of the mouth, great for craniofacial development, oral development, tooth development, and tooth health, which by the way are correlated with a number of other things like cardiovascular health and metabolic health. Ver- very interesting links there. And then the third point is that, uh, the, the book argues that the entire field of orthodontia, things like, um, braces, things like headgear, things like retainers, are the byproduct of poor, um, breathing and let's just say, uh, overconsumption of soft foods in place of hard foods, uh, behavior. And so there's this guy who's from your side of the pond, uh, Mu-

I like him already.

... he talks about the Mu method, um, of restoring normal craniofacial development. The book is chock-a-block full of impressive photos of before and afters, impressive because in some cases you'll see kids that were, um, mouth breathers or were eating a lot of soft foods and then they recovered their behavior, so to speak, and became nose breathers. Of course, we have to mouth breathe when we're exercising really hard.